Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Religious fundamentalists and biblical literalists present any number of arguments that attempt to disprove evolution. Those with a sympathetic ear often fail to critically examine these creationist claims, leading to an ill-informed public and, perhaps more troubling, ill-advised public policy. As Aron Ra makes clear, however, every single argument deployed by creationists in their attacks on evolution is founded on fundamental scientific, religious, and historical falsehoods - all of them.

Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World

Fighting God is a firebrand manifesto from one of the most recognizable faces of atheism. In his audiobook, Silverman - a walking, talking atheist billboard known for his appearances on Fox News - discusses the effectiveness, ethics, and impact of the in-your-face-atheist who refuses to be silent. Silverman argues that religion is more than just wrong: it is malevolent and does not deserve our respect. It is our duty to be outspoken and do what we can to bring religion down.

How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making

In How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making, Professor Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, uses research revealed via the scientific method to understand and explain human decision making. While his easygoing manner and anecdotes about surprising and bizarre choices will keep you enthralled, Professor Hamilton also shares what decision science has revealed through empirically tested theories.

On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

The assumption that Jesus existed as a historical person has occasionally been questioned in the course of the last hundred years or so, but any doubts that have been raised have usually been put to rest in favor of imagining a blend of the historical, the mythical, and the theological in the surviving records of Jesus. Historian and philosopher Richard Carrier reexamines the whole question and finds compelling reasons to suspect the more daring assumption is correct.

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on the Higgs boson and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void?

Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

Dr. Richard Carrier, world-renowned philosopher and historian, explains the four reasons he does not accept the Christian religion, describing four facts of the world that, had they been different, he would believe. Those four reasons are God's silence, God's inaction, the lack of evidence, and the way the universe looks exactly like a godless universe would, and not at all like a Christian universe would, even down to its very structure. Dr. Carrier addresses all the usual replies to these claims.

Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically observed, "If you torture data long enough, it will confess." Lying with statistics is a time-honored con. In Standard Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unaware of the mischief they are committing.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science

In this sharp, masterfully argued book, Dani Rodrik, a leading critic from within, takes a close look at economics to examine when it falls short and when it works, to give a surprisingly upbeat account of the discipline. Drawing on the history of the field and his deep experience as a practitioner, Rodrik argues that economics can be a powerful tool that improves the world - but only when economists abandon universal theories and focus on getting the context right.

Life Driven Purpose: How an Atheist Finds Meaning

For thousands of years, holy books have told us that such a life is available only through obedience and submission to some higher power. Today, the faithful keep popular devotionals and tracts within easy reach on bedside tables and mobile devices, all communicating this common message: Life is meaningless without God. Former pastor Dan Barker eloquently, powerfully, and rationally upends this long-held belief.

A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

Where did the universe come from? What was there before it? What will the future bring? And finally, why is there something rather than nothing? Krauss’ answers to these and other timeless questions, in a wildly popular lecture on YouTube, has attracted almost a million viewers. One of the few prominent scientists to have actively crossed the chasm between science and popular culture, Krauss reveals that modern science is indeed addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing—with surprising and fascinating results.

Cool: How the Brain's Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World

In Cool, the neuroscientist and philosopher Steven Quartz and the political scientist Anette Asp bring together the latest findings in brain science, economics, and evolutionary biology to form a provocative theory of consumerism, revealing how the brain's "social calculator" and an instinct to rebel are the crucial missing links in understanding the motivations behind our spending habits.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the Earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism?

Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life

History is not a prerogative of the human species, Edward O. Wilson declares in Half-Earth, a brave work that becomes a radical redefinition of human history. Demonstrating that we blindly ignore the histories of millions of other species, Wilson warns of a point of no return that is imminent.

Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

Long before the European Enlightenment and the Darwinian revolution, which we often take to mark the birth of the modern revolt against religious explanations of the world, brave people doubted the power of the gods. Religion provoked skepticism in ancient Greece, and heretics argued that history must be understood as a result of human action rather than divine intervention. They devised theories of the cosmos based on matter and notions of matter based on atoms.

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why - and how - it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion’s evolution from “wild” folk belief to “domesticated” dogma.

Misquoting Jesus

When world-class biblical scholar Bart Ehrman first began to study the texts of the Bible in their original languages he was startled to discover the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations that had been made by earlier translators. In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman tells the story behind the mistakes and changes that ancient scribes made to the New Testament and shows the great impact they had upon the Bible we use today.

Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it. The great dilemma of our shrinking world is simple: never before have those we disagree with been so present in our lives. The more globalization dissolves national borders, the more clearly we see that human beings are deeply divided on moral lines - about everything from tax codes to sexual practices to energy consumption - and that, when we really disagree, our emotions turn positively tribal.

Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled "quiet", it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society - from van Gogh's sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

De Waal reviews the rise and fall of the mechanistic view of animals and opens our minds to the idea that animal minds are far more intricate and complex than we have assumed. De Waal's landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal - and human - intelligence.

The Aging Brain

We're all getting older every day, and scientific research has shown that starting in our 20s, some brain functions begin a linear decline. But is old age all doom and gloom? Not at all! While it's true that some functions in the aging brain decline, neuroscientists have discovered that many other brain functions remain stable - or even improve - as we age.

Consciousness Explained

The national bestseller chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 1991 is now available as an audiobook. The author of Brainstorms, Daniel C. Dennett replaces our traditional vision of consciousness with a new model based on a wealth of fact and theory from the latest scientific research.

The Economics of Inequality

Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics. This work now appears in English for the first time.

No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life

What is life? What is my place in it? What choices do these questions obligate me to make? More than a half-century after it burst upon the intellectual scene - with roots that extend to the mid-19th century - Existentialism's quest to answer these most fundamental questions of individual responsibility, morality, and personal freedom, life has continued to exert a profound attraction.

Publisher's Summary

Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind. From Socrates to Galileo and Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking, this is an account of the world's greatest intellectual virtuosos - who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers - and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning.

What the Critics Say

"A bold and brilliant work and (lucky us) highly readable, thanks to the elegant and witty author." (Garrison Keillor)"A magisterial book...Hecht's poetical prose beautifully dramatizes the struggle between belief and denial...The breadth of this work is stunning." (Publishers Weekly)

Hecht's historical survey of doubt is a lot of things and seems to do them all very well. It is a defense of doubt, a survey of doubt, a biography of doubters, a family tree of doubt's relatives. It looks at doubt both from within and external to belief. It examines the motives and believers and gives each its appropriate due.

I found the book to be highly readable. Strange to say, it was almost TOO readable. I felt myself slipping through the pages/listening to the narration* almost too fast. It has given me a whole new group of thinkers and philosophers to examine. I was very familiar with many of the doubters in Western and Classical traditions, but Hecht gave me a whole new group of Eastern, Jewish and Muslim doubters to get to know. Plus, even with those nonbelievers & skeptics I was familiar with (Lucretius, Montaigne, Spinoza, Cicero, Epicurus, Pliny, Gibbon, Paine, Jefferson, Bruno, etc.) she gave me whole new approaches and windows to see them through.

Finally, Hecht also found an appropriate way to thread the Book of Job writer, Jesus, Buddha, Qohelet (wrote Ecclesiastes), etc., into the framework of doubt. I think the book would have been crippled without it. Finally, she didn't avoid the negative, state-sponsored doubt period (Fascism, Communism) of the 20th century. Not all doubters do good things. Anyway, it was worth the money and the time for sure and will be re-read in the future.

* If you listen, I'd still get a hard copy. It is worth it just for the bibliography. You are going to want to be able to dig deeper on at least half a dozen of the men, women, skeptics and doubters she mentions.

When one has certainty, there is no more room for further knowledge or understanding. Science and Reason never prove, at the most they can just show things to be less false than other things. There is a long history of people who haven't been certain and their story makes for a much more interesting revealing of human history than the ones who pretend to have no doubt.

There are two recurring characters in this marvelous book about doubters throughout history, the Stoic, Cicero and his "On the Nature of the Gods", and the Epicurean, Lucretius, and his "On the Nature of Things". Both get major play in this book, firstly when they are introduced and secondly they keep popping up through the rest of the story because their influence with latter sages has been immense.

Survey of philosophy books with their chronological presentation can often be dull since they lack a narrative to tie the story together. This book gives that necessary narrative and gives the listener a thread to understand the connections while telling a good story that includes snippets of world history, religion and summaries of what great doubters thought throughout the ages.

The author gives enough of the major points and sometimes long quotations from the primary sources to make the book or person under consideration come alive and make the listener feel as if he understands the person who wrote it. For example, I now realize why I enjoy the book of Ecclesiastics so much more than any of the other books in the Bible (it's mostly a Epicurean type polemic on the meaning of life). Her considered amount of time she spends quoting Marcus Aurelius is well worth it for the listener. I've never found anyone who I tend to agree more with and would strongly recommend his "Meditations" which is available at audible, but it might not be necessary to read it if you listen to this book instead.

The other thing to like about this book: she does not ignore the East at all. She gives them equal weight to the West throughout the text. Eastern Religions are fully explored since there is a much richer tradition of not being certain, "the more you doubt, the more you understand" would be a typical Eastern religion answer to the refutation of the certainty found in revealed religions.

Overall, this book gives a great survey of doubt throughout the ages, with many synopsizes of great thinkers, and all within an overriding narrative tying all the pieces together. I would recommend this book for anyone who does not like to "pretend to know things that they do not know", and wants to understand the firm foundation that entails.

*Because I said so,* cost me years of knowledge as a curious child in the world of adults. This was especially frustrating in the realm of religion (thanks to the Apostle Thomas, who bestowed upon the word DOUBT it's negative connotation) where we were thusly taught that "Faith is a higher faculty than Reason." From experience I can testify that "Why?" isn't received well as a response to that inspirational quote -- meant to drop the mic on the religious lesson, not encourage discussion.

My incessant childhood questions were my accusers -- I must not posses that *higher faculty.* Oh ye little one of little faith was tough to bear in an obedient community where church and commerce were one tightly woven cloth. Not until a couple years of college philosophy did I realize that there is a limit to our current knowledge that we fill with cultural beliefs, speculation, and philosophies. The WHY points to a gap in our current knowledge and doubt is what often fuels exploration. Imagine how happy I was to see this book with this title that praises knowledge and innovation attained through doubt! I wish that I had come across this book years ago -- but I didn't, so I'd like to tell you why you should take the plunge. Hecht, with wisdom, removes the taint from Doubt. She gives it intellectual respectability and ties it to the worthwhile pursuit of knowledge.

Typically, people who study a lot of philosophy are rather condescending. Studying just the basics: Sartre, Derrida, Kafka, Nietzche, Voltaire, Kant, Descartes, initially makes them feel sure they have the answers to the great secrets of the universe that no one else could possibly understand; that they are standing on the shoulders of those giants themselves, armed for the debate and waiting for sheep without ears, and melting pieces of wax honeycomb. Such confidence quickly dissolves when they see that those shoulders are actually just the tips of the icebergs of Philosophies pondered since the Pre-Socratics, still to be humbly learned.

Men considered great thinkers, such as Carl Jung, (who said he didn't believe in God, he knew God exists) and Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins (who said he is not "sure" there is no God; he is just as sure that there is no tooth fairy) argue their opposing points equally well and better than most of us could with years of study. Doubt: A History will not give you any such certainty, but it will enlarge your arsenal, and commitment to continuing your path to knowledge. Hecht manages to include an impressive worldwide sweep of philosophies, progressively or chronologically outlined briefly and succinctly enough to keep your interest, with the major points distinguishing each *philosophy* or school of thought. What she includes and condenses so well is a great review if you've studied some philosophy previously, or if you intend on pursuing that field of study it would be an advantageous introduction that would put any beginning student of philosophy at the head of the class. Most importantly it will encourage the why and the doubt. * A longtime fan of William Blake's texts, poems and Illustrations of the Book of Job, I particularly enjoyed Hecht's section on Job. (Job's God scares me.)

My first and favorite philosophy teacher (and subsequently professor for Critical Reasoning; Existentialism, Political Philosophy, Phil. of Law, etc. for a couple of yrs.) inspired in his students the pursuit of truth, belief and knowledge (I wasn't one of his success stories). He passed out this quote the first day of class: "A carving is made at the expense of all the stone that is thrown away. What did our beliefs compels us to discard on our way to revealing our image of what knowledge looks like?" Hecht's exploration of doubt has us considering those pieces of stone, questioning what Montaigne called common opinions and popular vote vs. knowledge.

If you never went through a cavalcade of studying the works of people who called b!?&sh@/ on religion, then this is the book for you. What a great education in the scope of these works. I really felt grounded around the issue of doubt through time as a result of reading it. It also upset me in that I was left with an overall feeling of hopelessness of safe coexistence with religion. Religion seems to come back with a vengeance and kill off or at least destroy the careers of people who say "No" to the delusions of its unvalidated precepts. It seems as though doubting ends up being a game of Whack-a-Mole.

This is a history book. And though more entertaining than a typical history book, it is still a history book. That being said, it should be on every humanists digital bookcase. While Dawkins and Hitchens have provided you a reason to question your faith, Doubt: Gives you the history of brilliant people who have sought the answers before you. I find myself reliably returning to this book, and most certainly will for a long time.

It got off to a bit of an uneven start, but soon I found myself completely engrossed. As a long time nonbeliever I found it inspiring to learn about the thoughts and fates of people like myself over the millennia.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I'm a regular listener to Reasonable Doubts and Skeptics Guide, and this book provides a wealth of detail to fill in background on a broad range of topics as well as giving a complete overview of Doubt through history.